Apple will carry out large-scale personnel changes in the team responsible for developing the Siri voice assistant. The new head of the department, Mike Rockwell, who previously headed the Vision Pro engineering team, has begun replacing top managers and restructuring work processes. According to analysts, this indicates dissatisfaction of Apple’s management with the current state of Siri.
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According to 9to5Mac, Rockwell will replace much of Siri’s previous leadership with experts from his Vision Pro software team. Specifically, Ranjit Desai, one of the project’s key engineers, will now lead Siri’s platform and systems development. Olivier Gutknecht will focus on the user interface, and Nate Begeman and Tom Duffy will work on the assistant’s core architecture.
Stuart Bowers has also been given a new role, focusing on improving Siri’s ability to understand user queries. Another project veteran, David Winarsky, will head up speech recognition and voice technology.
Apple is clearly no longer satisfied with the current pace of Siri’s development, which has long been criticized for lagging behind its competitors, and Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman has learned that Rockwell is either going to demote or completely replace Siri’s previous leaders.
Interestingly, it was previously reported that the Siri team was allowed to use third-party large language models (LLM) for the first time to improve functionality. Although this decision was attributed to Apple top manager Craig Federighi, it is possible that the initiative came from Rockwell. In any case, Apple clearly intends to radically change the approach to the development of the voice assistant.
With ChatGPT, Google Assistant, and Alexa all rapidly evolving, Apple is clearly going to have to act decisively. If the team reorganization goes well, Siri could finally see significant improvements in speech understanding, speed, and integration with other services.
While Apple hasn’t made any official comments yet, the company is believed to be preparing a major update to Siri that could be released in the next year or two. And if everything goes according to plan, the personal assistant could become a truly smart and useful assistant.